The world needs piracy for the good of humanity

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We here at Geek.com would never recommend performing illegal activities, and cannot condone making unauthorized digital copies or otherwise infringing upon copyrights. That said, humanity needs people to pirate everything.

Thanks to broadband, we have convenient, rapid access to media that was unheard of 15 years ago. If you want movies or music, you can stream them. If you want books, you can send them straight to your e-reader. If you want games, you can download them directly to your PC or console. It’s so much easier than going to a store, purchasing a physical copy of the media, and then finding room for it in your house. Even if you already have the hard copy, accessing whatever you want with a click or a tap makes actually getting up and pulling a book from a shelf or putting a disc in a drive seem like a pain.

This convenience has come with miles of string attached, and that’s how it has become a liability. Not only do we not own the media, but we don’t even control the means to consume the media. Movies, songs, books, and games are all copy-protected through different means, and some are absurdly draconian. Even if you download a file to your computer, game console, or tablet, you don’t own it and your ability to access it can be taken away at any time.

We ran head-first into the implications of this with Konami’s ugly trudge out of the console games industry and the collapse of Silent Hills. The game was first revealed through P.T., a mysterious demo that appeared on the PSN store that enthralled players. Despite being a short demo consisting entirely of a hallway and two rooms, it was so atmospheric and immersive that it earned a space on many gamers’ top ten lists of most effective horror game experiences. I would recommend anyone to play it at least once to see how effective video games can be at building a real sense of dread and horror.

However, if you don’t already have it on your PS4, it’s impossible to try play it.

The amazingly atmospheric hallway from a demo you can’t get anymore.

Konami unceremoniously delisted P.T. from the PSN Store, so you can’t find it online. In a rare and bizarre move, Konami also decided to prevent anyone who added it to their PS4 library from downloading it again if they delete it — a feature available for any piece of media on the PSN. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. Whether or not Silent Hills was going to turn out to be good, losing P.T. is a real shame that takes a genuinely engaging experience away from gamers. Yes, Konami has every right to remove its games from PSN, and to discontinue support of demos, but that’s the point. That’s precisely why we need pirates.

Specifically, we need pirate scholars. It’s an illegal activity (that we don’t recommend anyone actually do, of course), but cracking through copy protection and backing up media far, far away from the companies that legally control it is the only way to preserve that media for the future. Otherwise, humanity is going to run into a very big archiving problem, and creations will be lost.

Most large companies don’t do anything if it won’t make them money. It’s ridiculous to expect them to do otherwise. If there is no reason to archive media — if it isn’t profitable, if no one immediately cares about it and is willing to pay money for it — we can’t assume that they will work to preserve it. Again, as the owners of the rights of that media, they are legally entitled to ignore or destroy it as they wish. That’s why illegal efforts (which, again, we don’t condone) must be taken to preserve that media.

Every game, movie, book, and song is the result of human effort and creativity. Not every game is P.T. and not every movie is The Shining, but even the most garbage piece of media is garbage that was made with effort and released for public consumption. Even some garbage turns out to be brilliant works of art generations later, when looked at in a new light. Every piece of publicly released media should be archived in some way so we have that chance to broaden our perspectives and grow as a civilization, so we have some way to understand our history and art.

Computer storage was once talked about in terms of “libraries of Congress,” how hard drives and CDs could store so much text in so small a space. Storage density has increased by magnitudes since then, and now even cheap phones have gigabytes of space packed into chips smaller than a fingernail. The days of needing to make room on shelves are gone. We have the technology to store everything ever publicly released in multiple locations, with multiple redundancies. The capacity is there. The problem is the current methods of distribution we use, and the legal restrictions surrounding it.

Movies and music have generally avoided these problems by offering hard copy alternatives. Even Netflix shows that debuted entirely online have DVD and Blu-ray releases, but there are plenty of smaller films, especially fan projects that only exist on YouTube and other sites, that you can’t simply purchase and possess. You can buy the rights to access them, and many distributors even offer digital files free of copy protection, but there is no certainty that something that is online now will continue to be online. That’s the nature of the internet.

Video games have an even bigger problem. Steam, Xbox Live, and PSN have made purchasing games incredibly easy, but it’s made keeping them potentially impossible. Some publishers and developers offer copy-protection-free games you can download, keep on your hard drive, and use any time, anywhere, but others wrap up their games in so many methods of digital rights management that you simply will not be able to play them once the company stops supporting them. It’s an even bigger issue with online-only games that keep server technology hidden completely behind the publisher’s walls. When those servers go down, the game disappears.

We need a way to protect all media for posterity. It doesn’t matter that Silent Hills won’t be made, that no one really plays EverQuest now, that almost no one saw this movie or listened to that song. What matters is that it was created, and at some point it was experienced. It must be preserved so we can understand what we tried to do, what we did, and how we reacted. Losing any of it is a loss for us as a civilization.

Pirates should not steal content for personal use. Any artist or content creator should be compensated, supported, and recognized for their effort. Good works should be embraced and paid for. That’s not why piracy is necessary. It’s necessary so copies will be made for us to have access to in the future, when they would otherwise have been lost. That’s all. If there was a box that captured every piece of publicly released media and kept it, completely locked, so future generations could have access to it, that would be all we need. If publishers and developers were compelled to release games in completely open and unprotected format once they discontinue support on them, it would be perfect. If we could be certain that what we can access now can be accessed years from now, there wouldn’t be a problem.

That isn’t the case, and without the legal owners of the rights of the media doing it, it falls upon pirates to preserve it for the future. Without them, the media would be lost. Games, movies, songs, software — gone as soon as there’s no profit or use anymore, and that would be a real shame.

Fortunately, legitimate archiving efforts have begun for old material. Archive.org is an absolute gem that has preserved text, video, audio, and software from the past for use today and study tomorrow. It even has a collection of thousands of video games dating back to 1980. Heck, it even has the firmware and software of entire game and computer systems that would otherwise be lost to the past. It’s not enough for today, though, and the more recent the media, the more legally questionable archiving it becomes.

Archive.org’s software archives are a digital library of Alexandria, but almost all of the files there come from physical media and hardware. There were disks and cartridges to pull code from, and circuit boards to map out and dump firmware. There were things to work with. With everything online, we no longer have the luxury of being able to dig up an old disc in the back of a garage and find something from the past. If it’s only available online, it will eventually disappear.

Until digital archiving becomes a technical and legal constant, humanity needs someone out there to crack copy protection methods and actually make copies. Not for us, because we can and should pay for any media that’s currently commercially available. But for the future, when that media will vanish from the earth without an copies made.

Of course, the question is “who” and “how.” The “who” should be no one reading this, since this is a philosophical statement on the necessity of archiving and not a recommendation to break any laws in any way. The “how” is a question that I can answer neither legally nor technically. I’m just saying that, in a broad sense, we need to protect what we create, so we can enjoy it and study it in the future.

And I’m not saying you should pirate media with a wink and a nudge. Seriously: artists should be supported, even if we can’t depend on archiving.